How to improve the performance of a Friendica site

Feel free to ask in the Friendica support forum if you need some clarification about the following instructions or if you need help in any other way.

System configuration

Please go to /admin/site/ on your system and change the following values:

Set "JPEG image quality" to 50.

This value reduces the data that is send from the server to the client. 50 is a value that doesn't influences image quality too much.

Set "OStatus conversation completion interval" to "never".

If you have many OStatus contacts then completing of conversations can take some time. Since you will miss several comments in OStatus threads, you maybe should consider the option "At post arrival" instead.

Enable "Use MySQL full text engine"

When using MyISAM (default) or InnoDB on MariaDB 10 this speeds up search.

Addons

Active the following addons:

rendertime

rendertime

This addon doesn't speed up your system.
It helps to analyze your bottlenecks.

When enabled you see some values at the bottom of every page.
They show your performance problems.

Performance: Database: 0.244, Network: 0.002, Rendering: 0.044, Parser: 0.001, I/O: 0.021, Other: 0.237, Total: 0.548
Database: This is the time for all database queries
Network: Time that is needed to fetch content from external sites
Rendering: Time for theme rendering
Parser: The time that the BBCode parser needed to create the output
I/O: Time for local file access
Others: Everything else :)
Total: The sum of all above values

Apache Webserver

The following Apache modules are recommended:

Cache-Control

This module tells the client to cache the content of static files so that they aren't fetched with every request.
Enable the module "mod_expires" by typing in "a2enmod expires" as root.
Please add the following lines to your site configuration in the "directory" context.